As a homeowner, you know that house and property maintenance is one of your biggest challenges.
Interior furnishings, plumbing, appliances, paint, roofs, furnaces, gutters and downspouts, gardens, trees, driveways, sidewalks, cars, doors, etc., wear out, die, fade, break, or fall apart. Sometimes you’re lucky, and stuff lasts longer than expected. Sometimes, however, the wear-out process works faster.
The Sun City community association has the same problem, except on a much larger scale. They have two recreation centers, a wood shop, athletic facilities, and hundreds of acres of common areas to maintain. Every year, doing this requires many hours of time and takes a huge chunk out of the annual budget. Fifteen years may not seem like a long time to us, but for the association, it often signals a need to do some serious upgrading.
This is why the association puts a significant chunk of our resources into reserve accounts. The association’s master reserve account currently totals more than $5 million. It is a “rainy day” bank account that provides funds when our maintenance research tells us that we need to repair, replace, or repaint something. Each year, the association board of directors, with the help of the Finance and Facilities Advisory Committees, sets up a reserve budget. The 2015 version provides a good example of how this works. The board of directors has retained a consulting firm to advise it on the life expectancy of all of the buildings and facilities, as well as the landscapes, in Sun City. They review and inspect all the facilities, advise the board on the condition of everything, and provide some preliminary cost estimates.
In some cases, equipment or furnishings are replaced to upgrade their value, increase efficiency, or modernize resources. In other cases, repairs are made to restore items to their original condition and appearance.
As 2015 approaches, the board has developed a “to do” list of 80 maintenance items that have been identified for near-future repair or replacement. The preliminary cost estimates total more than $2.2 million.
But only a part of the list is expected to happen in the next 12 months. “We value the consultant’s recommendations on the life expectancy of these items, but in reality, not everything wears out or breaks down in the same way at the same time,” said Bonnie Bayser, CAM board president. “We do our own evaluations of the recommendations, and we delay some items if the need to upgrade them is not critical, and we sometimes bump up and fund some items that were recommended earlier.”
Some of the bigger-ticket items in the current reserve fund budget include repairing and repainting the exterior of both Prairie and Meadow View lodges, replacement of the Wildflower Lake pier, new furnishings and paint jobs for several activity rooms in Prairie Lodge, new interior room identification signage for Prairie Lodge, exterior repainting of the Millgrove Wood Shop and the gate house, repair of automatic door openers at Prairie Lodge, upgrade of HVAC facilities and equipment at the lodges, removal and replacement of diseased ash trees along Del Webb and Sun City Boulevards, resurfacing of the outdoor pool at Prairie Lodge, and replacement of mailboxes throughout the community.
Some of these projects will be done in 2015, others will be completed later.
The renovation of the card, or multi-purpose, room, some HVAC work, and the interior signage in Prairie Lodge is already underway. The ash tree project was funded and approved by the board last month. In the last two years, the board has spent more than $1 million at Prairie Lodge to repair and resurface the parking lot, and replace carpeting and re-paint interior spaces.
